AMD talks Shanghai performance, features, roadmap to 2010

AMD's 45nm Shanghai processor has been a topic of interest for months, but …

Randy Allen, corporate VP and general manager for AMD's Server/Workstation division presented AMD's server roadmap for the rest of 2008 today, hosted a conference call today on what the company is planning for 2009 and 2010. Barcelona's nasty stumble in the fall of 2007 raised questions about AMD's ability to execute effectively in the server space, so the company spent the first part of today's presentation talking up recent Barcelona design wins and reassuring journalists that the processor is shipping in volume now that the TLB erratum has been put to rest.

Unsurprisingly, AMD's upcoming 45nm Shanghai processor was the unofficial star of the day. Barcelona, despite AMD's best efforts, simply isn't capable of scaling to the frequencies required to aggressively compete against Yorkfield-based Xeon processors, to say nothing of Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture. To date, AMD's guidance on Shanghai's ramp has been strong; the company reiterated its plan to have its 45nm process technology in volume production by the end of 2008, with Shanghai processors presumably shipping very late in '08 or early in 2009.

According to AMD, Shanghai will consume approximately 20 percent less power at idle than Barcelona, and will offer a full 6MB of L3 cache, as opposed to Barcelona's 2MB of L3. AMD claims that Shanghai has approximately twice as much cache as Barcelona overall, which implies that the new processor retains the same 128K L1/512K L2 that Barcelona currently features. Other features include AMD-V (meant to improve virtualization performance) and support for DDR2-800 memory. Allen characterized Shanghai as a "tweak" of Barcelona's architecture, but predicts that we should see overall performance increase by 20 percent when comparing the two product families. He did not, however, break down how much of this performance might be delivered by higher processor efficiency as opposed to clockrate boosts.

If all goes according to plan, Shanghai will be superseded by Constantinople Istanbul in the second half of 2009. Istanbul is a six-core processor built on 45nm technology whose feature set and cache loadout should otherwise mirror Shanghai's. Like Shanghai, Istanbul will also be a monolithic core design, though it may be the company's last monolithic architecture in the top end of the server space. In 2010, AMD will introduce Magny-Cours, a twelve-core design (duodecim-core if you prefer the Latin) with support for DDR3 and what AMD is calling a "probe filter," which will reduce the amount of cross-processor cache snooping necessary to maintain cache coherency. 2010 will also see the introduction of Sao Paulo, a new six-core design with the same features as Magny-Cours, and the launch of the new "Maranello" platform, also known as Socket G34.

When it comes to performance in the here-and-now, AMD isn't saying much. While the company did feature some Barcelona vs. Xeon comparisons, most of the information was presented as a performance-per-watt comparison rather than in terms of absolute (or even percentile) performance. There's nothing wrong with performance-per-watt—it is, in fact, increasingly important—but it's also something of a refuge for companies and products that don't compare well "by the numbers." It doesn't help that AMD claims to have tested against Intel's fastest 80W part, but included only a Xeon 5440 (2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB L3) instead of a Xeon 5450 (3GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB L3).

AMD's new information on Shanghai leaves me feeling cautiously optimistic, but there are still a lot of empty spots in the company's roadmap. Sunnyvale refused to address any questions related to its asset lite "asset smart" strategy, beyond saying that asset smart, whatever it means, will have no impact on the roadmap as published today. Allen also dodged questions on when AMD will begin its conversion to 32nm process technology; the roadmap we saw today does not mention 32nm, despite stretching through 2010.

The pressure on Shanghai at this point is immense; all of the CPUs on AMD's server/workstation roadmap for the next 2.5 years are Shanghai derivatives. AMD's current financial situation and market share have left the company with no room for error; its next-generation CPU will need to shine from the get-go.